When the floor is gone
and other considerations
To be human means to be civilized, means if a glass jar you dropped shatters on the floor, you gotta pick up the pieces
you gotta pick up the shards off the floor and toss them out for someone else to toss farther away and out of sight
you gotta put on shoes that might deform your feet while protecting them from broken glass and gunk on the street when you take your dog out for a walk
you gotta not squat next to your dog on the sidewalk and poop, you gotta know better than that
you gotta stay in your lane, stop when they tell you to stop, park between the lines, and carry your permission slip at all times
you gotta sleep in your assigned place, and never sleepwalk or wander into other people’s places without permission
you gotta be okay with living alone, with the talking heads on screen the only company you keep, with a public sphere made of millions of complete strangers
you gotta comb your hair and dress up for when you’re out and about, you gotta launder your love’s clothes before you see him off at the long road, knowing he’s never coming back home again
you gotta put on a smiley face when you go out in public, even when you feel like crying and screaming and thrashing around in the dirt
you gotta say thank you when people say sorry for your loss, forget howling and sobbing over the blanket of concrete suffocating the dirt
you gotta sit through announcements and questions mouthed by machines that never learned about ambiguity and nuance
you gotta listen to machines that don’t hear right, that insist you’re wrong, that make you punch in arbitrary numbers and stand in long digital lineups listening to music they picked for you, waiting for a civilized human to talk to, who, when they finally come online, tells you you’re in the wrong place and loops you into another department via the same machine interrogation, and after two or three such handovers, the last human you talk to before you hurl your phone against the wall, the last human in your digital hell tells you they can’t help you and you have to go to the office in person even though there’s no such place for miles and miles
you gotta agree to all of this, follow rules you don’t understand, learn about places you’d never visit, believe reality you can never witness, allow bureaucrats you don’t even know exist to decide who you are, what you are, where you are
you gotta keep reading screens that tell you what to do and what to think
you gotta be wearing your shoes when you sit in front of a computer at your job, forget about walking barefoot in the forest and down the beach
you gotta have that job so you can eat
you gotta eat on schedule three meals a day even when you’re not hungry
or you gotta eat nothing even when you’re hungry because some civilized human you never met bombed out your bakery and grocery store, bulldozed your crops, cut down your ancient olive trees, poisoned your well, and pumped seawater into the aquifer beneath your feet
and you gotta line up with hundreds of people, waiting your turn for the only pooping place around, wondering if it’s fear or just the brackish, contaminated water you’ve been drinking that’s giving you the trots
but you don’t have to pick up the glass shards from the floor because the floor’s gone, it’s all broken and mixed up with chunks of ceiling and walls and doors and window frames and broken glass and crushed furniture and pots and pans and ripped curtains, and your books and your family photos
and your family
and you gotta dig through the rubble with bloody knuckles and lungs filled with toxic dust, all parched and lightheaded from not eating on schedule, looking for the bodies of your love and your children and your parents and brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces and grandparents and in-laws and cousins and aunts and uncles and teachers and doctors and bakers and poets and neighbors you were just talking to the other day, like your bone-weary friend and her scrawny newborn born into hell latching onto her cracked empty nipple
and there’s no one left to tell you how sorry they are for your loss, you can’t even talk to a machine with no signal to be found anywhere, and the buzz of the drones and ceaseless bombs drown out the muffled screams and the wailing infants and the whimpering dogs
one day you’re lucky to have a big loving family and many friends and the next day you’re not
you’re all alone while digital people on screens you can’t see on your bricked device talk about the devastation around you like it’s a newly discovered natural phenomenon — imagine that, folks, an earthquake recurring on a daily basis for months on end
and the people who make the earth quake — the people who killed the love of your life and your children and your parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces and in-laws and cousins and aunts and uncles and teachers and doctors and poets and the baker and your famished friend and her parched baby — the enlightened killers and their reps appear before the cameras and say to the world, nothing to worry about, folks, after all, these other people, meaning you and your family and friends, aren’t really human. To be human means to be civilized and you are but a savage, barbarian, a human animal lower than man’s best friend
which explains why you huddle in makeshift tent cities with dirt floors and nowhere private to poop, burying your dead in unregulated mass graves and kneeling in the dirt, hands tied behind your back, with only your unders on. And the people who make the earth quake can’t allow this kind of savagery. They gotta mow the lawn, eradicate the weeds, raze your houses and universities and bakeries and sewer treatment plants, bulldoze your cemeteries, target your ambulances, blow up your hospitals, and bomb all the roads so you can never go back home again
Nothing to worry about, folks, it’s just a bad movie, you all know that this recurring earthquake, just like the digital hell exploding on screens everywhere, can’t possibly be for real
